Grey turned to women to alleviate his pained sense of isolation, and the photographs of them interspersed among the newspaper clippings in his baseball scrapbook suggest that there were more than a few of them. One was a young seamstress named Doris who signed her letters “Diosus.” Zane had become involved with this woman in Orange during the 1897 season, and he continued to see her for eight years. Her sixteen surviving letters to him reveal her life to have been as hard as his. She lived at home, sang at church, and made dresses for scant, intermittent pay. Her father earned so little that the family had to rent rooms, and Grey met her during his stay in one. “I know how you must feel when not working,” she wrote to him in an 1899 letter, “and pity you profoundly because I have been there myself.” The pair seldom went out in public together, and relied on letters and covert meetings to sustain their relationship and escape the misery of their daily lives. Her affectionate salutations to “Dearest Muddy” evidence an informed understanding of his past life and psychological wellsprings. As their affair deepened and intensified, strains developed and worsened their anguish. In another section of the same 1899 letter, Diosus reveals how distressing and unsure their relationship was:
I think that we were both in fault. I most; because I acted like a fool. You were a little strange to me yesterday. I can not explain how. If there is anything to pardon, you may be sure of my complete forgiveness, but I am the one to be sorry, and ask your pardon. … I am right in saying that I am changing. I am growing bitter and restless; and such feelings must have no place in a heart which I have given to you to keep. Sometimes I feel as if that heart would burst with mingled emotions, and there, sometimes I am conscious of a hard, bitter, dissatisfied feeling that used never to be there. … Let us make these last few months that are left to us a time to be remembered, because of its fullness of love and happiness, and not a period to think of as dark and fraught with misunderstandings. We can do better and we know it. When we do not, our love suffers, and it is not our fault, and it is too beautiful, too perfect a love to wound by a careless remark or a frown.49
Two months earlier, Diosus had expressed her hope that R. C. might come east and stay with Zane because he was “terribly lonely.” In early April, before he rejoined his team in Toronto, R. C. did visit Zane and tried to lift his spirits. After the season was over, R. C. returned and they went camping together in the upper reaches of the Delaware River near Lackawaxen. Both were uneasily aware that baseball was a young man’s game, and their days as players were dwindling. They went to Lackawaxen seeking emotional uplift and liberation from pressures to take jobs and make money. The game that made them close as youths was now keeping them apart, and they looked to camping and fishing as an opportunity to reconnect. Zane badly needed a respite from bad teeth, foul breath, and six long days of work, and he hoped their outing would alleviate his dejection.
When Zane and R. C. arrived at Lackawaxen, the surrounding area of the upper Delaware River was a popular destination for summer vacationers. The rugged rolling hills and lazy, twisting river between heavily wooded banks formed a lush, inviting, pastoral landscape. The ferry ride from New York City to Hoboken and the hour-long train ride past several convenient stops made it readily accessible for city dwellers, who relished it most. Each year, thousands of visitors flocked to the area. A dozen hotels had accommodations for a hundred or more guests, and many farmers and homeowners rented rooms. A few miles south of Lackawaxen in Shohola, there was a large amusement park that attracted crowds in excess of 10,000 during peak season.50
This wave of vacationers, who came seeking a respite from work, were also rebelling against long-standing taboo. Early in the nineteenth century, as the country converted from Calvinism to capitalism, good citizens still believed that they had to work hard and save. Industry, productivity, and perseverance determined the success of the individual and the nation. Leisure and idleness, on the other hand, were vices fraught with moral, financial, and political danger. However, the new and enlarged middle class that emerged following the Civil War had the capital and the initiative to challenge this harsh distinction. Conceding that work was necessary and good, these upright citizens argued that it was also tiring, stressful, and unhealthy. Was it not better to take time off as protection against these damaging effects? According to this reasoning, vacations were not indulgence or dereliction. On the contrary, they restored physical and psychological vitality; workers became happier and more productive. As one scholar on the subject has argued, “Reconciling their need and desire for extended periods of rest and recreation with their commitment to work remained a central struggle for middle-class Americans.”51
By 1899, when Zane and R. C. first visited Lackawaxen, they encountered fellow vacationers who shared their enthusiasm for camping. Wealthy New Englanders first popularized camping with well-supplied outings during the 1880s. For the less affluent who followed, camping made vacation affordable. The exposure to fresh air, the spiritual uplift of nature, and liberation from work also made it therapeutic.52 Away from the claustrophobia, loneliness, and punishing routine of his New York office, Zane discovered that camping and fishing rejuvenated him.
Following his return, Grey relocated his office to a “dingy flat” on 100 W. Seventh-fourth Street.53 Actually, this Upper West Side location brought more room and better patients. He bought new curtains and furnishings to make his studio-office more attractive and accommodating. He then mailed engraved announcements stating that “Dr. Zane Grey” was open for business and offering “all modern methods and latest appliances for painless dentistry.”54 He affixed a plate on the front door that likewise dropped the Pearl and proclaimed his pen name before he had a novel to go with it.55
The next summer, the Grey brothers went for a longer stay in Lackawaxen. Earlier, when the baseball season opened in early May, Zane was again with the Orange Athletic Club and appeared in box scores until the end of September. However, from August 11 to September 8, he disappeared from the team’s roster for another visit to the upper Delaware that was longer than the year before. On August 28, 1900, while he was at the Westcolong railroad station, the next stop beyond Lackawaxen, he encountered an attractive young woman leaving the train. He initiated a casual conversation and learned that the buxom, dark-haired, brown-eyed girl called herself “Dolly.”56 Her full name was Lina Elise Roth, and her warm response to his overture initiated their lifelong relationship.
At the time, Dolly was seventeen, eleven years younger than Zane, and she had recently finished her freshman year at the New York Normal College (later renamed Hunter College), where she was preparing to become an elementary school teacher. Weighing 122 pounds, she thought of herself as a “living skeleton.”57 Although she was only 5' 4", she played on the women’s basketball team and was an active thespian. Her ebullient temperament and outgoing personality got her accepted into the Gamma Tau Kappa sorority and later elected vice president of the Alpha Beta Gamma Honorary Society. Her membership in the “Old Maid” club announced her availability, and her round-faced good looks guaranteed that she would not be single for long.58
In his 1918 letter to Anna Andre, Zane stated that Dolly came from an “old New York family [that] had no use for me.”59 Her father and paternal grandfather were successful doctors, and her maternal great-grandfather was the first coroner for New York City. Dolly and her widowed mother were currently living on Edgemont Avenue, and were about to move into a stately old residence at 701 St. Nicholas Street, near the southern tip of Manhattan. A series of untimely deaths had destabilized the prosperity and stability of the Roth-Battenhausen line and was weighing down Dolly’s spirits. Her father, Julius Roth, died in 1899 from a prolonged bout with Bright’s disease. Her paternal grandmother, Margarethe Roth, died more suddenly in February 1904. These misfortunes carried some benefit. Starting in March, 1904, when she was twenty-one, Dolly received a series of distributions from these estates that brought her $10,626 by January, 1906.60 This inheritance did not make D
olly wealthy, but it ensured her a comfortable, privileged life and freed her from having to sustain it by taking a job or marrying. However, her status-conscious relatives were suspicious of the older stranger from Ohio and openly questioned her association with him.
Lina Elise Roth, ca. 1900. (Courtesy of Loren Grey.)
During a stroll the day after their meeting in Westcolong, Zane boldly kissed Dolly.61 Since she had to leave a few days later, there was little time for more kisses, but they continued to meet and correspond when Zane returned to New York City, and their relationship quickly grew more intimate. Surviving letters from October and November of 1900 begin “Dear Dr. Grey,” but one from December 5 suddenly opens “Dear Pearl.”62 Early the next year, she began calling him “Doc,” a nickname that persisted through the hundreds of letters that followed. In the December letter with the changed salutation, Dolly frankly speculated whether or not she loved her new suitor. Concluding that she probably didn’t, she hastily added, “but sometimes, Oh dear!”63
This blossoming romance did not stop Zane from continuing to see other women. In May of 1902, Diosus wrote to him, “Dear old sweetheart. I’m so glad that you love me. Everything looks brighter and better to me when I think of you.”64 Other letters reveal that Diosus’s feelings for Zane carried no expectation of faithfulness. In one, she explained that worsening financial pressures had compelled her parents to rent “your little room with all its memories.” Acknowledging that his own shortage of funds further constrained their options, she added, “You know just as well as I do that any idea of marriage is ridiculous, not to be even thought of.” She proposed that they confront their circumstances with an open mind and agree to go out with others.65 However, an earlier letter betrays feelings of jealousy: “Don’t dare to take Reddy [R. C.] to see any of your other girls before you bring him here.”66 How many “other girls” there were can only be guessed, but Zane once admitted to Dolly that he had “loved” Nell, Kate, Maud, Alice, Loma, Visa, Edith, Daisy, Mabel, Emily, Madge, and Betty.67 A surviving letter from “Gertrude,” a showgirl to whom Zane sent a copy of his first novel, reveals at least one more who was very interested. “The other day I asked Madge,” she teased, “if you make love as you wrote in your book. She just laughed and didn’t tell me—so you must enlighten me—Do you?”68
When Zane left the OAC on July 13, 1901, for another trip to the Lacka-waxen area, he left for good. That Christmas, when he returned to Columbus, he was surprised to be recognized as a Zane by an old woman whom he did not know.69 Conversations with his mother rekindled memories of her stories about the Zanes, and of his boyhood reading about them in Our Western Border (1879) by Charles McKnight as well as his enthusiasm for Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels and the adventure stories of Harry Castleman.70 If there was any single epiphany that transformed the has-been baseball player and unhappy dentist into a writer, this was it. After he returned to New York and the drudgery of his dental practice, he found himself reflecting on the difference between the purposefulness of his distinguished ancestors and his discontent with his own life. Initially, their uplifting example sparked daydreams, but he soon decided to write about them during the evening in order to take his mind off his drab, wearying routine.
Grey’s initial efforts were almost certainly hampered by a consciousness that he had always been a poor student, especially in English classes. His letters reveal that he conscientiously read and reread writing guides like John H. Gardiner’s The Forms of Prose Literature (1900), Herbert Spencer’s Philosophy of Style (1873) and Principles of Psychology (1858), and later Clayton Hamilton’s Material and Methods of Fiction (1908). Dolly was also there to reassure him. She had taken many English courses, understood the fundamentals of good writing, and was willing to help. Her reading of his tentative efforts gained him approval and helpful suggestions, and encouraged him to continue. Unlike Diosus, who could only comment “I suppose you are writing for dear life,”71 Dolly’s letters from 1902–4 contain discussions of authors, books, and the craft of writing that were often naïve, sometimes even foolish, but they reassured him that someone was interested in his work and eager to discuss the process with him.
What Zane actually learned from Dolly and these guides is impossible to identify and document. He did not begin his first journal until 1905, more than three years after he started writing. In his love letters to Dolly, as in the many journals and letters that followed, he frequently mentioned that his writing was going well or poorly, but seldom explained the reasons why or discussed matters of importance to his craft. One surviving example of his early work, a transcription, enclosed in a letter to Dolly, of his opening to a new novel to be entitled Shores of Lethe, exemplifies the deficiencies and wrong turns of his early efforts:
Folly, thou hast cost me dear; the light of women’s eyes—Ah! Wine—thou mocker! Outcast am I, thrown from my father’s house hard upon the world, after an idle, luxurious, improvident youth. Better, surely to yield to the strain of suicide blood in me and seek forgetfulness in the embrace of cold dark death. What makes life worth living? Indefinable, for me, is the unpardonable sin. Yet to give it up, at twenty five, when the blood burns, for the unknown—No. I will see this game of life to its bitter end. I will try again, and yet again. Men may rise on stepping-stones of the dead selves to higher things.72
Since this overwrought passage is so different from anything in his early novels, one hesitates to ascribe it much significance beyond its exemplification of his tortured self-consciousness and the error of this stylistic experiment. But even this can be a distortion. In his love letters, his early novels, and his first journal, Grey writes far better than this example and rarely lapses into such archaic diction. Not only are his sentences grammatically sound and even graceful, but he also seldom crosses out a word or rewrites a sentence—a practice that extends through the many handwritten manuscripts of his novels. Like many other American writers, Grey’s woeful lack of formal training in writing was not the liability it would be for most people. Despite false starts like this, he was able to write easily and well, almost naturally.
What Grey needed more than training in sentence formation and paragraph structure was an outlook and subject matter quite different from that of Shores of Lethe. Here again, his first journal is instructive. Anyone coming to this journal for information about Zane’s daily life or insights into thinking can be frustrated by its many pages of scenery description; he rarely mentions the novels on which he is working, the criticisms that accompanied rejections of his work, or rewriting that he may or may not have attempted. On the other hand, these descriptions read like conscientious exercises in the variant moods created by different seasons, weather conditions, or times of day. It is as though Grey’s primers had advised him to move away from himself and his feelings as the point of reference, and to locate an effective equivalent in the circumstances around him. These descriptions anticipate the poetically rendered scenes of his later work that set the tone for the upcoming drama and action. These early efforts contain little of the awkwardness of the Lethe passage. They also show him downplaying and externalizing his own feelings, a tactic that invigorated his early fiction.
One early sign that Dolly’s support of Zane’s literary efforts was gaining her an edge on her competition was a hasty January 31, 1903, note from Zane informing her, “I will come up for you about 7:30 tomorrow eve. Mr. Shields has invited me to bring (no, fetch) a pretty girl down to his place. … Dress up and look the part. I would not wear that low-necked and shaped lopped-off dress; but something suitable for music and dancing.”73 By this point, Grey had been writing for more than a year and he was taking Dolly to meet the editor who provided crucial support for his earliest efforts. “Shields” was George O. Shields, the current editor of Recreation. Shields’s commitment to the outdoors and the cause of conservation led him to found the Camp Fire Club in 1898.74 He then started Recreation to promote the club and to circulate news of interest to the membership. As edito
r of the magazine, he accepted Grey’s first article, “A Day on the Delaware,” which appeared in the May 1902 issue. Shortly after the event to which Zane escorted Dolly, Shields accepted his “Canoeing on the Delaware” for the June 1903 issue. Grey’s invitation for Dolly to meet Shields expressed confidence that she would make a favorable impression. Since he had already enlisted her help with his writing, the invitation may have also been an expression of gratitude. Even more revealing about his feelings toward Dolly was his willingness to appear in public with her, in contrast to his covert relationship with Diosus.
By writing every moment he could spare over the fall and winter of 1902–3, Grey was able to complete several articles and his first novel. In spring, he dispatched the finished manuscript of Betty Zane to various publishers, including Harper and Brothers, and was promptly sent back demoralizing rejections. Unwilling to accept defeat or give up on his investment of time and hope, he contacted the Charles Francis Press, a small firm with shaky finances, and explored paying for publication. Since the fee of $500 exceeded his meager resources, he had to enlist help. Dolly has been frequently identified as his benefactor, but it was actually Reba Smith, who was romantically involved with R. C.75 They too had met in Lackawaxen, and when R. C. finally quit baseball after the 1903 season, they became engaged. Reba was sympathetic toward her fiancé’s appeals on behalf of his unhappy brother. The coal mines owned by her family in Blairsville, Pennsylvania, furnished her ample funds; her trust was large enough that R. C. never worked after their marriage.76 Dolly, on the other hand, was not yet receiving distributions from her trusts and was therefore unable to help with the publication bill. But Zane was grateful enough for her encouragement and suggestions that he proudly presented her one of the first copies of Betty Zane as a Christmas gift.77
Zane Grey Page 6